Apr 20 2009
How To Stop Comment Blog Spam
Everybody hates SPAM! And no i am not talking about the processed canned meat, however canned meat does not sound that appetizing. What I am talking about is the annoying comments that are automatically posted to your blog that just contain a bunch links promoting commercial services. If you own a Wordpress blog and have the comments enabled, which is something I highly recommend, then you are bound to get spammy comments! However, I have Good News for you! There is a way to prevent comment and contact form spam…
How To Combat Comment Spam:
There are two great Wordpress plugins you can download to your Wordpress blog that will take care of your Spam problems:
1.) WP-SpamFree
WP-Spam Free is an extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. This is a Free Wordpress plugin that I use along with Akismet, which I will get into later. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, challege questions or other inconveniences to your site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well. It virtually elimantes automated comment spam send out from bots.
*Download the latest version of WP-SpamFree
2.) Akismet
Akismet, on of the most popular Wordpress plugins, is a spam filtering service, which filters link spam from blog comments and spam trackback pings. You may have noticed when you look your plugins menu that you already have Akismet installed in your Wordpress blog, this is because it is highly recommend that you activate and use it! However, you must activate the plugin in order for it to work!
*If for some reason you do not have the Akismet plugin you can Download the latest version HERE
How to Activate Akismet
1.) In your Plugins menu you must press activate next to the Akisment plugin
2.) You will need a API key: Every user of Wordpress.com automatically gets a API key (*Note you do not want to share this key with anyone!)
- To find your API key simply go to your dashboard -> click users ->Your Profile
- You should see a sentance that says ” your Wordpress.com API key is ” where your key is the 12 numbers following
- You can see your key at http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/profile.php
3.) If you do not have a wordpress account and still want to use Akismet you can register on Wordpress.com and obtain a API key!
4.) once you have a API key and you activated Akismet then you need to go to plugins-> Akismet-> Configuration and enter your API key and that is it you are all set!
*For any Questions regarding Akismet you can go HERE!
Combat Contact Form Spam:
There are two great Wordpress plugins you can download to help combat Contact Form Spam
1.) Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP
The Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form plugin for Wordpress is one of the best, most accessible, spam proof contact forms out there. This plugin allows you to add a spam proof contact form to a wordpress page or a template. It is fully customisable with CSS, and even has a few themes contained to get you started.
2.) cforms II
The cforms II plugin for Wordpress offers convenient deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. It also allows you to customize the messages, the fields that are required, the email addresses to be used, and even create different contact forms to be used in different locations of the site. The cforms II allows for spam-free environment and is relatively easy to customize.
Till Next Post,
Krista
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Hey!
I just connected with you on twitter today! It’s awesome that you are blogging!
Keep blogging and persist!
I use akismet in wordpress and that does pretty good…. I will have to check out some other one’s in your post!
Thanks!
have a great day!
Dbk aka: IBK
hey this is a very interesting article!
Hello. I think the article is really interesting. I am even interested in reading more. How soon will you update your blog?
recapcha is always a good option to avoid spam.
but I still go for manual check of the administrator or a quality checker.
that is why I have my admin task to do comment moderation.
thanks for sharing your thoughts, very interesting!
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I bookmarked this site, Thank you for good job! Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Well, these are quite good plugins to avoid spam and it’s a problem for every blog owner and not only Wordpress blogs, those who’re tired of spam also gets them moderated but it’s also not much of help because you’ve to manually delete each and every comment so it’s better to get a filter for spam and get those comments filtered out which doesn’t contribute to the site in any way! It’s a tough job running a blog, but a couple of checks I saw like adding a 10-20 seconds limit feature on comment box, it will not let you comment before 10-20 seconds you spent on the page or if you do your comment won’t be posted. Such checks helps.
First time i heard about the these two plug-ins ,i will try these two ,thanks for info.
I have some sites using WP-Spamfree alone because it cannot use Akismet anti-spamming services due to hosting limitation(free hosting disables important function like fopen), and Wp-Spamfree seems can only detect around 50% to 70% of total spam.
The rest of the spam did clutter in the comments under moderation section.
I have also some sites that are both using WP-Spamfree and Akismet and it looks like they are the most effective corrective action when used to stop comment spam. Only 1% of spam did go through “comments under moderation”, the rest of the spam is blocked.
I recommend that if you have a paid hosting account, you should be using both WP-Spamfree and Akismet together and update them when an update is available.
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